


not a single line of beauty

by seimaisin



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Angst, F/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seimaisin/pseuds/seimaisin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nathaniel wants more than Elissa has to give.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not a single line of beauty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for louvette for the Dragon Age Holiday Cheer exchange on Tumblr. 
> 
> Title stolen from Tim Brantley's "I Can't Make You Want Me." Thanks to cherith for the beta!

To say the first time took Nathaniel by surprise would be an understatement. He and Elissa Cousland were enemies, or so he would have said. She’d spared his life only to condemn him to a slower death by darkspawn taint, a madness he could feel creeping inside his skin when he lay awake at night. She didn’t speak to him unless strictly necessary; he preferred it that way. 

That, however, was before she showed up in his room. “Do you remember,” she asked, pacing the floor from door to window and back again, “when you and Delilah and I spent a whole day spying on Fergus and that one bann’s daughter?”

Nathaniel blinked. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just thought about it today.”

Nathaniel hadn’t thought about it in years. He’d done it mostly out of jealousy - the girl had rebuffed him, but was perfectly happy to spend her day tangled up in Fergus Cousland’s kisses. He wanted to know why - but the girls, he knew, had done it purely for fun. “You and Delilah pretended to be assassins on some kind of royal mission,” he remembered.

“Yeah. We did.” 

He had no idea why Elissa's face shuttered at the comment. He had even less idea why she crossed the room, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, and mashed her lips to his.

Nathaniel was surprised enough that he stumbled backward, into the wall, and found himself held in place by a slender body that contained far more muscle than he remembered. After a moment, Elissa pulled back, but kept her body flush against his. "Tell me to leave," she whispered.

"What?"

"If you tell me to leave, I will. I don't know ... I can't ..." She looked down at the hand that rested on Nathaniel's chest.

If he was a better person, he would have pushed her away and told her to go back to her own rooms - rooms that had belonged to his father, rooms that, by rights, should have been his. He should remember that, he thought; this was the woman who killed his father. Not the girl he'd kissed in the Cousland library, once upon a time. That girl was dead. That boy was dead, too, come to think of it, beaten to death somewhere in the Free Marches. They were both broken people, hardened by life and torn apart by acts of war. They had no reason to end up like this.

But then Elissa looked up. Her gaze was haunted. And hungry. It was the hunger that did Nathaniel in.

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her again. 

Sex with Elissa wasn't any different than serving under her as a Warden. She pushed, pulled, took what she wanted without stopping to ask what Nathaniel would prefer. But Maker help him, it was exactly what he wanted. When they were both undressed, she pushed him onto his back on the bed and straddled him. His cock began to harden as it pressed against her soft, warm center; it came fully to life when she raked nails and teeth across the skin of his chest. He was apparently a glutton for punishment, where she was concerned. 

She closed her eyes as she rode him, her hand rubbing between her legs. Nathaniel could only watch, hands roaming her body in a way he never thought he'd be able to do. Not that he'd imagined sex with her often, or even recently. But having her here, in his bed, felt like the culmination of something he hadn't known he’d asked for.

There was a word in her gasp when she came; he didn't understand it, but it had the sound of a name. Not his. 

Only after his orgasm did Elissa open her eyes and look down at him. She climbed off and sat next to him on the bed, dark hair falling into her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said.

He wasn't. "It's okay."

"I just needed ..."

"Yeah." 

She pushed the hair away from her face. "Why did you let me?"

"Maybe we both needed something."

Elissa nodded. "Yeah. Maybe we did."

She gathered her clothing and left the room quietly. Nathaniel lay awake for a long time that night. 

The next morning, he found Elissa at the table in the dining hall, ignoring her food in favor of staring at a letter. When she noticed him, she stuffed the letter into her vest and looked away. Nathaniel didn't ask. It wasn't anything he wanted to know.

*

The city of Amaranthine lay in ruins. But somehow, Nathaniel didn’t think that was what caused the darkness in Elissa’s eyes. None of them - not Anders, not Velanna, not even Oghren would talk about what happened at the Dragonbone Wastes. “Be thankful she left you here,” Oghren said. “It was ugly.” Still, Nathaniel felt a bit useless, having stayed to clean up the Keep while Elissa went out to confront … whatever it was they confronted.

“What happened out there?” he asked, sitting down next to her on her bed.

“You don’t want to know. You really don’t.” 

“But we won.”

“Yeah, we did.” 

At what cost? Nathaniel didn’t know, but he’d always been taught that war had casualties. He felt for the people in the city, but privately he thought it was better that they die than that the darkspawn escape the city and overrun the entire arling. “You made the right decision. About the city.”

“What? Oh, yeah. Thanks.” She looked at her hands, folded in her lap. “I wish I knew if every decision I made was right.”

“I’m sure they were.”

“Are you?” Elissa looked up at him, lips twisted in what he supposed should have passed for a smile. “It wasn’t too long ago that you doubted me.”

No, it wasn’t. Killing his father, sparing Nathaniel’s own life … he’d doubted those. Still did, on some days. But as a Warden … “You know what you’re doing. I trust you.”

She looked at him like he’d just given her a gift. “Thank you,” she whispered.

She said it again, later, as he pounded inside of her with enough force to buckle the elbows that helped brace her against the bed’s headboard. His hands gripped her hips hard enough that he figured he’d leave marks - not that they’d be all that visible around the bruises that already decorated her body. He worried that he was hurting her, but she protested every time he tried to slow down. “No. Harder. Please, harder, faster, more …” She thrust her ass backwards to meet him, and threw her head back when her orgasm hit. “Maker - fuck - thank you …”

Later, when he pushed himself up off the bed, she turned over and looked at him. “Nathaniel.”

“What?”

“Will you stay? Just for tonight.”

“Sure.”

She lay facing away from him, curled up into herself like she was trying to make herself smaller. He placed a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. “Sorry,” she said. “I have a hard time falling asleep with someone touching me.” She seemed to have a hard time falling asleep regardless, as he spent quite a few minutes watching her squirm into different positions. He thought about leaving - maybe his presence was causing her insomnia - but this opportunity might not come again. Maybe, if he just stayed awake long enough, he could see her at rest. At peace. They both deserved a little peace, he thought.

She was still fidgeting when he drifted to sleep. 

*

He realized he was in love on a rainy summer day, in a hidden alcove in the outside wall of the Keep. 

Elissa’s hair was plastered to her neck, and she laughed as she urged him on. “Come on, right there, that’s it … that’s the spot, oh …” She wore no armor, so the stone must have been rough against her back, but she wrapped her legs tightly around Nathaniel’s waist and moved in time with his thrusts. Rain and sweat poured down his face, into his eyes, making her face blurry - a shame, because she was gorgeous like this, in all her abandon. 

She so rarely smiled, when she was the Commander of the Gray. Oghren could make her laugh, and she sometimes spared a smile for Sigrun, at some secret joke they seemed to share. On a very good day, she’d sit in the common room with the rest of them and laugh softly at the jokes and insults her Wardens shared. But usually, this was the only way Nathaniel was graced with her smile, and he silently cursed the raindrops that obscured his vision. But he couldn’t spare a hand to wipe them away, not when both of his were full of Elissa. 

She said his name, and something inside of him broke. As she began to shudder, he buried his face in her neck and said the words that overwhelmed his mind. Her heels dug into his back; through his watery vision, he saw her face contort in her orgasm. The smile was gone. It did not return when she came back down to earth.

When she slid down to stand on her own, she refused to look at him. She murmured something that sounded like “I’m sorry” before turning toward the front gate, leaving him alone in the alcove.

 

*

An Antivan merchant set up shop in the city’s new market district. He carried a variety of knives and weaponry, so Elissa, Sigrun, and Nathaniel stopped to browse as they traveled through town. “Excuse me,” the merchant said, looking at their uniforms, “but do you know Commander Cousland?”

Elissa raised an eyebrow. “I’m Commander Cousland.”

“Aha! I wondered. I have a letter for you.”

Nathaniel and Sigrun looked at each other; Sigrun shrugged. Elissa, however, froze in place. She didn’t move until the merchant reached under his counter and pulled out a sealed envelope. “Thank you,” she said softly, accepting the envelope and tucking it into her bag. 

She didn’t read it in Nathaniel’s presence. He didn’t know what was in it; he could guess, though, thanks to Oghren’s tales of the Blight. He knew he competed with an assassin - or, really, he didn’t compete at all, because he couldn’t compare to the mysterious elf. He had none of Elissa’s heart, only her body from time to time.

It was enough, he told himself. It was enough to have Elissa drop to her knees later that night, take him into her mouth. It was enough that she seemed to enjoy his cock, licking and sucking and making noises that sounded pleased when he groaned and ran his hand through her hair. It was enough to spread her out on his bed and pleasure her, to know the soft gasps and moans were all for him, in this moment. Here, while her orgasm flooded her brain, she knew no one but him. There was no one between them here.

Or so Nathaniel told himself, anyway.

The moment didn’t last. When she sat up, Elissa hugged her knees to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t fair.”

He couldn’t pretend not to know what she spoke of. “What’s fair?” he asked. “Nothing’s fair. You just take what you can while you can - it’s all anyone can do.”

“You deserve more.”

Nathaniel shrugged. “I don’t know about that.”

Elissa stared at him for a long moment. “I’m sorry,” she finally repeated, before pushing herself off the bed.

“So am I,” he told an empty room, several minutes later.

*

It wasn't long after the letter that Elissa disappeared.

“The note says she went to Antiva,” Velanna said, frowning.

“Of course she did,” Oghren grumbled. “That blighted elf.”

“Is she coming back?” Sigrun asked.

“No.” Everyone looked at him. Nathaniel just stared past the top of Oghren’s head, allowing himself to be blinded by the morning sun shining through the Keep’s windows. “She won’t be back.”

Oghren patted him on the arm. When he looked down, the dwarf’s expression was surprisingly sympathetic. “Come on, Howe. Let’s go get drunk.”

“It’s still morning,” Velanna said.

“So?”

“I’ll take a drink,” Nathaniel said, nodding to Oghren. 

“Good. I’ve got the good stuff up in my room. Come on.”

That night, his head filled with dwarven ale, Nathaniel dreamed of Elissa. She lay in his bed, limbs entwined with an elf whose face Nathaniel couldn't see. She chanted a name, over and over, as they danced the dance of passion in the very place Nathaniel had once had Elissa. Or part of her. Never the part that laughed through her orgasm, or smoothed his hair back from his face as he spent himself inside her. 

He woke. The stone ceiling above his bed was a far more comforting sight than the back of his eyelids. 

Nathaniel lay alone, and tried not to dream.


End file.
